Hidden inside boater sit boater, borate, and rebato, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 88 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble OBTARE, BRATEO or ROBATE and you get the same 6 letters as BOATER: so the words from BOATER listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
boater, borate, and rebato tie for the highest Scrabble score from boater at 8 points. The top 10 of 88 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 six-letter words hiding in boater: two come from rearranging its letters, and boater itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are boater, borate, and rebato, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 6 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in boater. If a familiar word is all you need, start with abort. For points, the strongest plays are abort, boart, taber, and tabor — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in boater produces 26 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bare, bear and beat. For points, 15 words tie at 6 points, including bare, bear and beat.
Unscrambling boater turns up 38 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with are, art and ate. For points, 15 words tie at 5 points, including bar, bat and bet.
There are 15 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in boater. If a familiar word is all you need, start with at, be, or, and to. For points, the strongest plays are ab, ba, be, and bo — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
19 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in boater plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in boater and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
boater is in the NWL, the official Scrabble word list for North America, and in the Words With Friends dictionary, so it's playable exactly as it stands and needs no unscrambling.
The 1-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record two senses for boater. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
boater is one of three six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing boater unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are boater, borate, and rebato, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from boater earns more points in Scrabble. Words With Friends prices the same letters differently, so the top of the list changes on a Words With Friends board. Both scores count tile values only and exclude premium squares.
The letters in boater produce 88 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 six-letter words, 6 five-letter words, 26 four-letter words, 38 three-letter words and 15 two-letter words.